That’s no surprise, the main brunt of the housing problems have statistically been in Cali, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

However, when kids who grew up in the suburbs decide to move into the city, they are “yuppies” who are “forcing out” the people who were already living in the city.

Make up your mind already, will you?

I’m from a city in MA that was originally Irish; its earliest name on the map was, in fact, “Ireland Parish”. Then the WASPS moved in. Then the Italians, Poles, French Canadians, Greeks. Each group had its own neighborhood, school, and church.

In the 1960s, Puerto Ricans found it to their liking. The city now has one of the highest Puerto Rican populations of any city in the US.

Today, it’s Punjabis. One of the highest densities of this group in the US, too.

Fires took out a lot of the historic buildings, from the Opera House to the old high school which had been converted into the community college. Redevelopment mostly affected farm lands rather than slums that were once middle class housing. But with all the mills and factory closed, there were attempts at redeveloping those sites.

Prior to WWII, Georgetown in DC was mostly a slum. It was predominantly a Black area and people kept livestock in their small backyards. That certainly changed; it’s now among the priciest areas in the city. ‘Yuppification’ has pushed many of the poor out of other parts of the city, extending the ‘safe for Whites’ zone eastward by a few blocks over each of the last few decades.

Housing prices in Georgetown have taken a hit in the current housing crash, but as most owners had had their homes long before the bubble started to grow, there’s not much panic. Houses that are priced realistically (relatively speaking, of course) are still selling, even if that price is in the low millions. With a new Administration coming in, there will be some churning, of course.

It seems to me that neighborhoods are markets just like anything else – if you can afford to live there and want to, so be it. If the rents can be afforded, the people building the buildings get paid for their risk. Everything with where you live is tradeoffs – obviously if you have kids and live in River North, you have to factor in private schooling to your costs rather than send them to Chicago public schools (that is, if you care about them). Location is a factor as always. So many other things too.